The Vogue Talents Corner Showcase

In just one year, the Vogue Talents Corner showcase at Palazzo Morando, cohosted by Vogue Italia and thecorner.com, has become famous for two things: one, demonstrating incredible local support for young designers, mostly from Italy but also all over the world, by introducing them to international press and selling their collections online; and two, causing a very glamorous traffic jam. On Thursday night, town cars funneled down Via Montenapoleone onto a side street (and, if they had to, the sidewalk) to deliver some of fashion’s biggest names—Diego della Valle, Franca Sozzani, Domenico Dolce, Stefano Gabbana, Roberto Cavalli—to the presentation. Federico Marchetti, founder of Yoox Group, which owns thecorner.com, was optimistic about what they came to see. “I think every season we go one step further in terms of quality and selection of talent,” he said. Okay, but what did he like? “Jewelry, great; bags, great, and there is a South Korean designer who lives in New York.”

That would be Kuho Jung, who has his own line, Hexa by Kuho, of minimalist, architectural, urban clothes and is also the creative director for the fashion division of Samsung (who knew?), a sponsor of the evening. His fellow Talents included Pedro Lourenço, a rising ready-to-wear star from Brazil, and Shourouk Rhaiem, a French-Tunisian jewelry designer based in Paris who affixes chunky crystals—in fact, not wholly dissimilar to those seen on the clothes at Prada just an hour earlier—to clear, plexi bib necklaces, earrings, and bracelets. “This is incredible,” she said, with a huge smile. “Without this, I’m not sure I’d meet so many of these people.” Who knows whether she would have met Dolce and Gabbana otherwise, but they were there, and in a way, the event made Dolce nostalgic. “Everyone in fashion has their first time, their first show,” he said. “Then after that, you need to stick to your own character, your own style, and never ever stop. You need ideas, and there’s a lot of sacrifice. Fashion is like a mission, like a priest, a calling.” And with that, he and Gabbana departed to presumably work on their own collection, which hits the runway Sunday.